A collection of automotive stuff, restaurant/travel-related items and personal observations; mostly a lot of claptrap, really.

Nashville

Taken a few years ago at some joint on Broadway in Nashville, this was one of several photos with good-looking girls I had never laid eyes on before. It wasn't my birthday, but the Nissan crew was telling every attractive female we encountered that it was. Here's to getting older!

Sunday, December 31, 2017

I'm not the kind of guy to dwell on the
past; but, because this is New Year's Eve, it seems appropriate,
obligatory almost, to blog about the year that's closing out at
midnight. Plus, slacker Russ is running the show today and doing a
year-in-review wrap up saves me from dipping into my rather shallow
creative well to come up with a blog-post idea. It's a win, win, win,
win......or something like that.

First and foremost, let me apologize
for another spotty year of Clanging Bell posts. In January of this
year, I posted that I would strive to do better, promising to crank
out a CB post per week. Looking at the 2017 count, I see that this is
post No. 31 for 2017. Somewhat better than a post every two weeks, it
falls far short of the one-per-week promise. I am
crestfallen....well, not exactly, but I had really intended to knock
out a blog post a week. I won't make excuses beyond saying, I have
been sufficiently busy this past year that some weeks – 21 to be
more specific – I just didn't have the time or energy or motivation
to write a post. It has been a pretty good year for paying work.
That's a good thing when you are a freelance journalist. It wasn't my
best year, but it was a good one. I'm blessed that at the ripe age of
66, there is still an employer or two out there that values my work
enough to compensate me for it. Even I grow sick of writing. When I'm
busy writing for profit, I just don't have enough steam left in the
boiler to do it for fun.

I've also been grinding away producing
content for just3thingsvideo.com, and, during the last three or four
months of the year, I made a big push to launch my BEER2WHISKEY
YouTube channel. I will be promoting both projects in a big way in
2018. Stay tuned for more info. In the meantime, it doesn't cost you
anything to subscribe to BEER2WHISKEY. I urge you, when you finish
sleeping off the Clanging Bell-induced coma reading this post will
probably induce, to go to YouTube, search for BEER2WHISKEY and
subscribe. Here's a bit of an incentive: This spring there will be a
subscribers-only BEER2WHISKEY sweepstakes for a $2,000 Katzkin
leather interior. Who wouldn't like to have that, right?

I got over my mad at the Steelers for
their National Anthem shenanigans. I purchased my Villanueva jersey
and then skipped a couple of weeks of watching the games. I guess I
showed them. Anyway, I'm back in the fold. They are going to the
playoffs having handily won their division by beating the other three
division teams twice. Well, they have yet to get their second win
over the Browns. That's scheduled today. Because only a handful of
Steelers starters will participate in today's game, the Browns may
just rack up their first win of the season. Then again, maybe not.
They are the Browns after all.

When I turned 65 in 2016, my body began
breaking down. Healthy as a horse for 65 years, my 2016 birthday was
like hitting a wall. Stuff just started going wrong. I did have knee
surgery this past March for a meniscus tear that developed about two
weeks after my 65th birthday. A number of other maladies
of varying degrees of seriousness that reared their ugly heads during
the past several months will be addressed this year on a
first-come-first-served basis. I'm just happy to still be upright and
taking solid nourishment.

I am knee-deep in renovating my home.
The big project this past year was covering the great-room ceiling in
tongue-and-groove beadboard. That was a job and a half. I still need
to paint and trim it out, but the big job of actually installing the
beadboard is finished. I still need to finish the upstairs. That will
involve replacing the carpet in the small hallway with hardwood and
installing a barn door for the bathroom. I have all the materials to
tackle this part of the job. I just need a week or so of down time to
do it. I will finish both of these jobs in 2018. Then it will be on
to rehabbing the kitchen.

So, that was basically 2017 in a
nutshell. All in all, a pretty good year. I expect 2018 to be more of
the same. I have four BEER2WHISKEY shoots lined up at craft breweries
in Houston this month in conjunction with the Houston Auto Show. I
also have Jeep and Infiniti media launches I am attending. Of course,
all of these are in the same week. Figures, doesn't it? The story of
my life. But, quite the story it is.

My 4-1-1

I began covering the automotive industry in 1986, when I parlayed my position as a retail sales rep into helping conceptualize and establish a stand-alone automotive section for the Boca Raton News a Knight-Ridder newspaper in South Florida. In 1995 I moved to the Palm Beach Post to help develop its bi-weekly automotive pages. Leaving there in 2000, I freelanced car reviews to a variety of publications before assuming a senior editor position at AMI Autoworld magazine in 2001. While at AMI I helped launch NOPI Street Performance Compact magazine and was appointed its managing editor. I have been freelancing since leaving AMI in 2004. My regular outlets have included Hispanic Magazine, the Miami Herald, the Washington Times, the Journal-Register Newspapers, AAA Go magazine, MyCarData.com, Automotive Metrics, AutoTrader, Bankrate.com and Interest.com.

In addition to freelancing automotive reviews, from 1991 until 2001 I was supervising producer of the syndicated television series Discover America.